San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Army eases strict rules for women’s hair
As an Army National Guard officer who has deployed all over the world, Capt. Jawana McFadden always felt the Army’s strict rules toward women’s hair needlessly compromised not only who she was as a person, but how she performed as a soldier.
In civilian life, McFadden has what she calls “tons of curls, and big poofy hair that I love.” But for 22 years, when it came time to put on her uniform, she had to use gel and a hot comb to comply with requirements that women have short hair or a tight, disciplined bun.
The bun pushed her helmet forward over her eyes, she said, so that “when you got down in a fighting position, you couldn’t see.”
“It wasn’t just that my self and my traditions weren’t reflected in what it means to be a soldier,” McFadden said in an interview from her home in Inglewood, Calif. “It also just didn’t work.”
In a military increasingly dependent on women, and particularly Black women, that is now changing.
The latest update to the Army’s uniform and grooming regulations, which took effect Friday, offers several revisions that give the 127,000 women serving in the Army and National Guard a chance to finally let their hair down — at least a bit.
For the first time, women will be allowed to have buzz cuts. And they will be able to wear combinations of styles, such as locks pulled back in a ponytail, which for years were off limits. The new rules allow short ponytails at all times, and long ponytails in combat and in training when a bun might otherwise interfere with equipment.
“It’s long overdue,”
McFadden said of the change. “It shows that the Army is recognizing we can be soldiers and still be ourselves, that being a soldier and a Black woman is valid and valued.”
Women also will be able to have highlights in their hair and wear conservative shades of lipstick and nail polish, so long as they are not “eccentric, exaggerated, or faddish,” and they can wear stud earrings while not in field training or combat.
And the regulations for the first time include guidance on breastfeeding, allowing soldiers to wear a specifically designed nursing T-shirt under their camouflage coat, and authorizing women to unzip the uniform and, without using a cover, “breastfeed anywhere the soldier and child are otherwise authorized to be.”
Since the 1970s, the number of women in the Army has grown from about 2 percent to about 15 percent of the force. In recent years, they have integrated into nearly all combat units and been promoted to senior leadership positions.
Today the once-reluctant military is now actively seeking to make serving more attractive to women, said Kate Germano, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and former head of the Service Women’s Action Network, an advocate for women in uniform, because leaders realize they cannot succeed without them.
“It’s a matter of national defense,” Germano said. “We just don’t have enough male candidates to do the job.”
The military has developed an especially outsize reliance on Black women, who, Germano noted, account for nearly a third of all women in the military, even though they make up
only about 15 percent of the civilian female population. Black women now serve in the military at a far higher rate than any other demographic group.
Though the military in the past resisted accommodations for women, it now
recognizes that people from all backgrounds need a voice in what it means to be a soldier, Michael Grinston, the sergeant major of the Army, said this week.
“When I started in the Army, the saying was ‘All I see is green,’ ” said Grinston,
who joined the Army as an artillery soldier in 1987 and holds the Army’s most senior enlisted position. The saying was a way of expressing that, regardless of sex, race or background, the Army treated all soldiers the same. “Recently,
someone told me, ‘When you say that, you don’t see all of me,’ ” he said. Seeing everyone as identical kept him and other leaders from understanding the unique challenges and contributions of individuals, he added. “That was really powerful.”
When asked if men’s facial hair would be the next frontier, Grinston laughed and said he received several comments every week from soldiers yearning for beards. The Army currently has authorized about 550 men to grow beards under religious exceptions, but all other facial hair beyond mustaches that are “trimmed, tapered, and tidy” is forbidden.
The sergeant major said beards would probably get serious consideration in the next round of updates. The Army is a learning organization, he added. “Just because we’ve done something for the first hundred years doesn’t mean we have to do it for the next hundred years.”